An integrated approach for assessing sustainability of categories of industrial activities referring to air pollution based criteria

In 1987, the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) initiated the concept of sustainability and its evaluation in engineering field has become a significant issue since it is very difficult to evaluate the performance of industrial assets due to nature and number of traditional and sustainability indicators. The paper presents a method to classify sustainability of different industrial plants according to the Integrated Pollution and Prevention Control (IPPC), the strategy individuated from European Union to reduce pollution of industrial sites which have high environmental impact. The basic of the proposed approach consists in defining a Multi Criteria Decision Making Approach (MCDA) able to cope with a general set of sustainability indicators. The approach integrates a three levels Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model, where different specific data analysis and management techniques can be integrated in order to properly face different nature of available data, with a further advanced analysis based on a sustainability Index considered in current literature by Diaz-Balteiro & Romero (2004). The alternatives, 6 categories of IPPC activities located in Apulia (ITALY), appear at the lowest level of the hierarchy. At the second level 14 Criteria consisting in different air pollutants have been considered. The AHP results show the incidence of each IPPC category on the final sustainability referring to a less is better indicator. The following sensitivity analysis allows decision makers to evaluate effects due to variation of subjective importance that the different criteria considered induce on overall systems sustainability. the sensibility analysis performed in this work, playing on relative comparison of “most balanced performance” versus “most sustainable” solution may allow decision maker the choice of optimal solution to the sustainability problem faced.